Eighteen-year-old Jens Friesen has plenty of drive. A football star and fundraising dynamo, he’s taken his prowess to work at a car lot where he plans to make a fortune and send it home to help his parents. The problem is that he hasn’t got any earnings, and by the end of the first chapter, neither does he have a job. He still has his pride, though. So when his younger brother, Daniel, asks him for help with a debt, Jens doesn’t confess his own predicament. Instead, he hatches a plan that takes them on a road trip through the small towns surrounding Winnipeg, trying to raise money by selling demo tapes of Daniel’s music – blues guitar and vocals. Not surprisingly, the road to success isn’t laid out quite as Jens anticipates.

Because of the multiple tensions that drive it, the plot of this novel speeds along nicely. Some of these tensions are external: Jens and Daniel have a lot of ground to cover in a short period of time if they want to avoid trouble. Most of the tension, however, is internal: what remains unspoken in the boys’ family raises the emotional pressure to combustible levels. Wieler has used first-person narrative for the first time in this novel, and it’s a technique she wields skillfully. In the beginning, we see Jens as he wants to be seen, but as the narrative progresses, his character is revealed in considerable depth as we get some interesting glimpses into his unconscious – especially through his sexuality. Like Wieler’s previous works, this is emotional realism that’s both uncompromising and compassionate in its delivery.